New Yorker Manipulations

Jeffrey Goldberg's recent piece about Israeli settlers so distorted and sloppy with facts as to raise questions about his other writing.

The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg is not known for dishonesty; he's recently won awards for daring stories on Hizbullah and Iraq. But a May 31 piece entitled "Among the Settlers: Will They Destroy Israel?" is so distorted and sloppy with facts as to raise questions about his other writing.

The title signals the thrust of the piece, and indicates there will be little interest in balanced or thorough consideration of the genesis, purpose and legality of the settlement enterprise. Instead, readers find a 24-page spread, rich in stereotypes and heavily devoted to lurid portraiture of Jewish residents of the West Bank and Gaza. A number appear emotionally unstable, and many are physically repellent -- one has "fingernails [that] were chewed and dirty," others are "sallow" and "sour-faced." The opening "Zealots" section has one after another spewing vile language and fierce anti-Arab sentiment.

Moshe Levinger, with "bulbous eyes" and "outsized teeth," is said to be the "face" of the settler movement, a man who calls for expelling any Arab "who hurts Jews." Yet Goldberg contradicts himself, writing, for example, that "three-quarters of the Jews in the West Bank and Gaza could be considered economic settlers" -- that is, not motivated by religious fervor -- and the remaining 25% of the "national religious camp can be divided into two main groups." One part will "respect the authority of the elected government in Jerusalem" as compared to what he terms the "more unremitting settlers" of Hebron. So Levinger the Hebron firebrand is part of a minority of a small minority.

Another indicator of his tangential role can be seen in a Nexis search of major world publications for the past three years. Goldberg's "face" of the settler movement was mentioned in fewer than a score of media stories, and these mainly in passing references to his activity in the late sixties in Hebron. In contrast, Ron Nachman, mayor of Ariel, turns up in four times as many news citations. But perhaps the writer preferred readers not to see this "face," or to know that at the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, hundreds of Arab men and women earn degrees along with Jews.

Goldberg sticks to his dominant message -- that religious fanatics disconnected from Israel's daunting, real-life political challenges embody and define the entire settlement question. Thus too he skates over or ignores completely essential information about the history of settlements. In the entire piece, there is not one mention of the Labor party's embrace of the Allon Plan, first enunciated in July 1967. That peace proposal defined Israel's defensive territorial needs in the wake of the Six Day War, consistent with UN Security Council resolution 242, whose framers believed it would not be in the interests of peace for Israel to return to its pre-1967 armistice lines. The Allon Plan projected ambitious settlement construction to secure strategically critical areas such as the Jordan Valley, areas in general sparsely populated by Palestinians. In the next decade, under Labor prime ministers, 76 settlements were built.

Goldberg alludes to Labor's founding role only in a brief, misleading observation that "such men as Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin"... "discerned a strategic value to settlement; these kipa-wearing pioneers would keep watch over the newly-conquered Arabs..."

In fact, Israelis who established the 21 Jordan Valley settlements, for example, were primarily not yarmulke-wearing religious settlers, but secular men and women who founded kibbutzim and moshavim for security reasons.

No residents of the Jordan Valley or Gush Etzion or other, similar Allon Plan communities were interviewed for the piece.

Goldberg is equally deceptive in his single, dismissive reference to the legal status of settlements. He declares simply: "Most international legal authorities believe that all settlements, including those built with the permission of the Israeli government, are illegal."

That's it. Case closed.

None of the "international legal authorities" are named, and none of the contentious issues involved are described.

The writer fails to mention that the United States does not characterize the settlements as "illegal." And many experts on international law have disputed their illegality on multiple grounds. Prof. Julius Stone, a leading scholar on the subject, has maintained that the effort to designate Israeli settlements as illegal is a "subversion... of basic international law principles."

Also suggestive of both the casually incendiary tone of the piece and Goldberg's shoddy approach to accuracy is his repeated charge that Israel is practicing "apartheid" in areas "across the Green Line." He explains the system is "apartheid, because two different ethnic groups living in the same territory are judged by two separate sets of laws."

One wonders whatever happened to the touted fact-checkers at The New Yorker. In the West Bank, there are different laws not on the basis of ethnicity but of nationality. The Palestinian Autonomous areas have their own legal system - mainly inherited Jordanian law and new law introduced by the Palestinians themselves. Moreover, if Israel moved to extend its own legal system to the territories, that would constitute annexation, which both Palestinians and Israelis oppose, and which would be universally condemned.

The areas under emergency Israeli military control are, as Goldberg notes, "temporary." To bring the charge of "apartheid" in circumstances involving the Israeli military's recent counter-attack against a terrorist onslaught unprecedented in the nation's history is, yet again, highly distorted.

"Among the Settlers" is one of those accounts that says more about its author than about its subject. It is a gaudy display of twisted Jewish assault on caricatured "other" Jews, and intellectually dishonest generalizations about the representative significance of those "others." In occasional moments of professional integrity, Goldberg introduces facts -- such as the very small percentage of settlers represented by his featured "representatives" -- and those facts demonstrate less the strength of a zealot threat to Israel than the weakness of Goldberg's zealot journalism.

The opinions expressed in the comment section are the personal views of the commenters. Comments are moderated, so please keep it civil.

Visitor Comments: 2

(2)
M. Lerner,
September 7, 2004 12:00 AM

Goldberg the "Torah Scholar"

Jeffrey Goldberg's article is full of lies and distortions as pointed out
by David Wilder (see http://www.honestreporting.com/a/wilderletter.htm )
and others.

Among those besmirched by Goldberg is Rabbi David Samson.
I would like to protest Goldberg's defamation of Rabbi David Samson,
a great Torah scholar and human being.

Goldberg blatantly lied when he wrote the following:

'Like many ideologues of aggressive settlement, Rabbi Samson drew lessons directly from the Bible, without the moderating influence of two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism. In the Bible, the heroes are warriors and killers; the Talmud, compiled after the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jews, asks, “Who is a hero?” and answers, “He who controls his passions.”'

The truth is that Rabbi Samson's philosophy is based on sources
in both the Written and Oral Torah. It is an understatement to say that
Rabbi Samson is well versed in rabbinic Judaism.

But lo and behold, the journalist "Rabbi" Jeffrey Goldberg,
apparently thinks that he knows Torah better than Rabbi Samson!
So Goldberg, the man of great erudition, "quoted" in the name of
the Talmud what is actually written in the Mishnah(Avot 4:1):

"Ben Zoma said: Who is wise? He who learns from all men, as it is written (Psalm 119:99) "I have gained understanding from all my teachers."

Who is mighty? He who subdues his passions, as it is written (Proverbs 16:32) "One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and one whose temper is controlled than one who captures a city."

I wonder if "Rabbi" Goldberg, when he was "learning" the Mishnah,
noticed that the Ben Zoma's source is biblical (Proverbs 16:32) .
Does Jeffrey Goldberg know that King Solomon, builder of the first Temple, wrote the Book of Proverbs? Does he know that King Solomon was a biblical hero who was neither a warrior nor a killer?

Ironically, Goldberg forgot to apply the Mishnah to himself.
He could not control his passion! He stooped down to the low levels of deceit
and slander in order to advance his political agenda.

(1)
Elie Cohen,
June 13, 2004 12:00 AM

Made me sick in my stomach ,Newyorker piece.

I lived in Israel many years and lived through all the events you described,I feel ashamed and very sad that some fellow jew can be so "antijewish".Is a jew ,a believer in G.D and his Thora by definition,,then how can a Jew despises his fellow religious brothers for behaving as G.D asks,something is very wrong,this week Parashat Korah all over again,very sad indeed...E.C.

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Since honey is produced by bees, and bees are not a kosher species, how can honey be kosher?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

The Talmud (Bechoros 7b) asks your very question! The Talmud bases this question on the principle that “whatever comes from a non-kosher species is non-kosher, and that which comes from something kosher is kosher.”

So why is bee-honey kosher? Because even though bees bring the nectar into their bodies, the resultant honey is not a 'product' of their bodies. It is stored and broken down in their bodies, but not produced there. (see Shulchan Aruch Y.D. 81:8)

By the way, the Torah (in several places such as Exodus 13:5) praises the Land of Israel as "flowing with milk and honey." But it may surprise you to know that the honey mentioned in the verse is actually referring to date and fig honey (see Rashi there)!

In 1809, a group of 70 disciples of the great Lithuanian sage the Vilna Gaon, arrived in Israel, after traveling via Turkey by horse and wagon. The Vilna Gaon set out for the Holy Land in 1783, but for unknown reasons did not attain his goal. However he inspired his disciples to make the move, and they became pioneers of modern settlement in Israel. (A large contingent of chassidic Jews arrived in Tzfat around the same time.) The leader of the 1809 group, Rabbi Israel of Shklov, settled in Tzfat, and six years later moved to Jerusalem where he founded the modern Ashkenazic community. The early years were fraught with Arab attacks, earthquakes, and a cholera epidemic. Rabbi Israel authored, Pe'at Hashulchan, a digest of the Jewish agricultural laws relating to the Land of Israel. (He had to rewrite the book after the first manuscript was destroyed in a fire.) The location of his grave remained unknown until it was discovered in Tiberias, 125 years after his death. Today, the descendants of that original group are amongst the most prominent families in Jerusalem.

When you experience joy, you feel good because your magnificent brain produces hormones called endorphins. These self-produced chemicals give you happy and joyful feelings.

Research on these biochemicals has proven that the brain-produced hormones enter your blood stream even if you just act joyful, not only when you really are happy. Although the joyful experience is totally imaginary and you know that it didn’t actually happen, when you speak and act as if that imaginary experience did happen, you get a dose of endorphins.

These chemicals are naturally produced by your brain. They are totally free and entirely healthy.

Many people find that this knowledge inspires them to create more joyful moments. It’s not just an abstract idea, but a physical reality.

Occasionally, when I walk into an office, the receptionist greets me rudely. Granted, I came to see someone else, and a receptionist's disposition is immaterial to me. Yet, an unpleasant reception may cast a pall.

A smile costs nothing. Greeting someone with a smile even when one does not feel like smiling is not duplicity. It is simply providing a pleasant atmosphere, such as we might do with flowers or attractive pictures.

As a rule, "How are you?" is not a question to which we expect an answer. However, when someone with whom I have some kind of relationship poses this question, I may respond, "Not all that great. Would you like to listen?" We may then spend a few minutes, in which I unburden myself and invariably begin to feel better. This favor is usually reciprocated, and we are both thus beneficiaries of free psychotherapy.

This, too, complies with the Talmudic requirement to greet a person in a pleasant manner. An exchange of feelings that can alleviate someone's emotional stress is even more pleasant than an exchange of smiles.

It takes so little effort to be a real mentsch.

Today I shall...

try to greet everyone in a pleasant manner, and where appropriate offer a listening ear.

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